Howto: Install OSX Lion under Windows 7 and VMware

So I decided to learn objective C, partly because it’s been a long time since I developed anything besides web apps and partly because I have a couple app ideas in my mind. Anyway, it turns out there is no option to code for the iPhone on Windows 7 (besides Visual Studio. Thanks, but no thanks) so I decided to install OSX Lion using VMware. I read a whole bunch of tutorials on how to do it and finally succeeded. Here is a simple step by step guide so you can try it yourself

What will you need?

You need a bootable OSX Lion image. Not sure how to legally acquire it but here is a link for a torrent file

VMWare Workstation. Now this is a paid software but a quick search on isohunt will help you out. I recommend getting the latest version (9.0) if you can

VMWare hard drive files. You can download them from here (self-extracting exe)

Still in “Edit virtual machine settings” click “Add…” then “Hard Disk” then “Use an existing virtual disk and browse to the downloaded OSX Lion image (the big one)

Click “Power on this virtual machine” to launch the virtual machine. If it asks you a random question (can’t remember what exactly was it) answer “I copied it”

The installer should start in a couple of moments. Just follow the installation steps and you are ready to go

Couple of problems / tweaks

The image by default will only work with 1024×768 resolution which can be really annoying. To solve this copy “darvin.iso” from your “Sysprobs Lion Files” to an usb drive and install it on your OSX system. After the install and the reboot you will be able to choose whatever resolution you want

Sound doesn’t work. I’m still trying to figure out how to solve this

I tried to install OSX on my work computer which has an AMD processor but it gave me errors. There are some tutorials around the web to solve that problem, but its time consuming so I just didn’t bother. Just google the exact error message and you will be able to solve it if you really want. The method described here works perfectly for my Intel i7 desktop and my Intel i5 laptop (I guess it should work on any Intel chipset systems)